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Some Schools Want To Stop Serving As Voting Sites

Professor Nathaniel Persily weighs in on the possible repurcussions of schools choosing not to serve as polling places for ABC News.

Some schools want to end their traditional role as polling places because of security concerns since the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut, leaving their communities without easy alternatives for voting sites.

A presidential commission has been hearing from election officials across the country worried about schools trying to move balloting out of their buildings. Among them is the Glen Ridge School District, a prosperous community less than 20 miles from Manhattan where the Linden Avenue and Forest Avenue Elementary Schools are now closed to balloting.

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”Schools are in many ways a perfect polling place because of accessibility concerns, they usually have adequate parking, they’re large facilities, large rooms, they’ve historically been used as polling places, and they’re ubiquitous,” the commission’s senior research director, Nathaniel Persily, told commissioners as he summarized months of research at their final public meeting Dec. 3. “The closing of schools poses a real problem for finding adequate facilities for polling places.”